Amidst grim reports this week that California schools are 鈥渇ailing to invest enough time, money and training to teach science well,鈥� and that only one out of 10 elementary school students gets to play with hands-on science experiments, a shining counter-example is happening at the Nueva School in the wealthy San Francisco suburb of Hillsborough.
Sixth-grade students are using Wii remote controls to collect scientific data on things like positive and negative acceleration and thinking about conceptual issues like the difference between engineering and science.
Led by Stanford researchers, the class is using Wii remote controls (available online for anywhere from $15 to $40) to create things like a rat-trap car, a marble roller-coaster, and balloon-powered vehicle to test different theories.
With the rat-trap car, students have created a Wii-strapped vehicle with CDs as wheels, like a skateboard. They鈥檝e already experimented with smaller mousetraps and lighter batteries to see if the cars would go faster, but landed on the rat trap as the best way to measure the information they needed.
The main objective of the experiment is not necessarily to measure speed, but to show students how to capture data like scientists do. Kids are typically confused by graphs, but with the Wii experiment, they could see the horizontal, vertical, and lateral aspects of the accelerometer.
鈥淜ids see patterns in data,鈥� said Wendy Ju, one of the Stanford researchers working with the students at the Innovative Learning Conference held at Nueva recently. 鈥淲hat does that data do to contribute to their designs?鈥�
With the marble roller coaster, students used the Wii remotes to test their theories on speed. They designed the roller coaster, then used the infrared camera in front of the Wii remote to see where in the structure the marbles would role by the fastest. The same idea was used to test the speed of the balloon-powered cars.
During the course of the classes, the Stanford researchers have been surprised by students鈥� reactions: The students were more interested in the designing phase than by the measuring phase.
鈥淪tudents had a hard time letting go of the engineering,鈥� Ju said. 鈥淭hey wanted to keep redesigning things. The moments of talking about measuring stuff was interrupted by trying to find ways of redesigning and changing things.鈥�
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